Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

haydenjames.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 184 posts

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#41

Post by restingrobot »

fermienrico wrote: post #28
j45 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work has come much down by many orders of magnitude. It's possible to have digital ocean/cloud type experiences locally.. pretty reasonably.

How can you do that? Don't you need a proper static IP from the ISP unless you have some sort of a mega business connection? Edit: thanks for the responses, I didn't know this was even possible.

You can get a static IP through my business provider, (Cox), for free. It comes with the business subscription. Getting a business subscription is as easy as signing up for it. I work from home and the guaranteed speed and higher line priority is worth ~$20/month premium. Also no data cap!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#42

Post by aidenn0 »

Cieplak wrote: post #5
MivLives wrote: post #2

Kinda curious what the noise level is with those fans. I know there's no proper rack mount servers there that need the fans running full blast, but I imagine 4x120mm fans is still loud.

Any rackmount server will be a nuisance. I ran rack servers at home for years but recently replaced my servers with ATX form factor machines, which are super quiet, ventilate much better and still stack nicely. There are plenty of ATX Xeon motherboards that support ECC ram.

a 4U rackmount server is identical form-factor to a 19" tall tower.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#43

Post by j_walter »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #20
j_walter wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their hardware is great, but pricey. Used server can be had for a lot cheaper and you can get the same functionality with Xpenology. Not sure the electricity savings outweighs the upfront hardware costs.

> Is Xpenology Stable? > As a person interested using Xpenology you should keep in mind, that this is not an official Synology release. Although it’s based on the official Synology DSM which is the same as whats found on the actual Synology devices, it’s not officially supported by Synology. You could get support from the community for this software, but not from the company itself. Typically once you’re up and runni…

I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but it's been super stable for me. The biggest issues come with the software upgrades and certain configurations may have issues, however the Xpenology forums have massive support and everyone lists how their upgrade experience went across multiple platforms (VM and bare metal). It was worth it for me.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#44

Post by breakfastduck »

m0xte wrote: post #31

I had a fairly large home lab once. I had a fully topped out SPARCserver 1000E and a disk enclosure in my bedroom. I also once lived with an E450 on the kitchen table for a month. But they’re noisy as hell, inconvenient, expensive to keep running and expensive to feed with power and take up a lot of room and thus are not compatible with family and general sanity over time. They become needy balls and chains. So roll…

For a lot of people, a home lab isn't just to provide themselves a service, they actively enjoy the setup and management.

So I think your final line is more personal preference than a lesson most people with home labs need to realise.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#45

Post by aidenn0 »

heisenzombie wrote: post #6

I currently have a home server with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging off it, which I pool using ZFS. That was fine when I only had 2 drives, but now my "USB Octopus" is getting silly. What's the next step in hardware if I want my server to access a bunch of disks?

Find whatever fits your needs here: https://www.icydock.com/index.php

I've never been unhappy with anything I've bought from them.

If you want a lot of 3.5" internal hot-swap drives, you may need to find a case with 5.25" bays, which is getting harder to find.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#46

Post by glynnforrest »

arthurcolle wrote: post #17

PLEASE BACKUP YOUR STUFF NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! I lost 50GB of options data going back 4 months yesterday + 2.5TB of currency data going back 20 years because I never checked that my backups were running. Please don't let this happen to you. EDIT: Literally just write a script that backs up flat files or binaries to S3 every N intervals.

That's terrible. There's nothing worse than losing data.

I'm working on this exact problem at the moment: a dashboard to keep track of your backups to check they never fail. https://backupshq.com

* Get notified when backups fail or take too long via email, slack, webhook, etc.

* Run your backup scripts and tools with an open source agent, which takes cares of reporting backup results to the dashboard.

* Alternatively, write your own integration with our API to report backup results and send logs yourself.

I'm hoping to launch privately soon, I'd love to hear what you think. We haven't made any pricing decisions yet, but definitely want to give free credit to homelabbers!

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#47

Post by j_walter »

m0xte wrote: post #34
j45 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your electricity usage footprint might outpace the savings that appear to be the case up front. Separating your storage as an appliance/service (dedicated NAS with low power usage) is worth running a comparison on.

So much this. I think my energy bill for my single PC as mentioned elsewhere in this thread works out about $70 (equiv) a year. When I had the full whack server rack it was pulling that a month and 99% of the time it was idle.

This might depend on where you live...my server pulls 180W average with 11 hard drives (10 reg, 1 SSD). That works out to ~$150/yr at my electricity rate of $0.0816/kwh.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#48

Post by Cieplak »

j_walter wrote: post #22
Cieplak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any rackmount server will be a nuisance. I ran rack servers at home for years but recently replaced my servers with ATX form factor machines, which are super quiet, ventilate much better and still stack nicely. There are plenty of ATX Xeon motherboards that support ECC ram.

Depends on your storage needs. More than 6-8 hard drives and getting an ATX form factor machine is near impossible, while many brands/generations of rack mount servers fit the bill for cheap.

Fair point.

My log machine uses six 16TB SATA drives configured as ZFS mirrors, so effectively 48TB of storage, which I back up to S3.

SAS drives are better but the current setup meets my needs.

Re: Building a Home Lab Beginners Guide

#50

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

harha wrote: post #23

Any recommendations on home networking? I couldn't figure out what the established approach would be to having access to the infrastructure over a consumer internet connection and without exposing the rest of the network. All resources I've seen so far don't give enough background to seem reliable.

Seconding that Ubiquiti Edgerouter if you want a mostly GUI guided config. They're solid enough for gigabit internet in the better models and the builtin firewall and tunneling options are good enough for most purposes -- the recent releases also let you install Wireguard, which is getting to be the preferred low-effort VPN solution for most platforms if you have a limited set of remote clients.

PFSense or OPNSense, which are based on FreeBSD, are also great if you have any remotely modern spare x64 computer lying around with two network ports.

IPv4 is purely outbound NAT, IPv6 I have several subnets carved off that will allow IPSEC traffic to certain local hosts for some of my remote office setup but I've mostly switched to using Wireguard from basically everything that hits the Edgerouter and drops me onto a private v4 and real V6 space.

Works great for my phone and laptops from basically anywhere and tunnels all my traffic back to my homelab and then out to the internet again. I have Wireguard uses UDP port 443 on v4/v6, which now that QUIC is common enough can tunnel out of every network I've tried, even normally hyper-anal corporate ones.

Locally I have a Microtik switch with 10G fiber between my work machines and gigabit ethernet to the rest of the house, then a few Ubiquiti Unifi "semi-pro" APs for the house and back yard.

Primary storage host is running FreeBSD serving iSCSI from local zfs raid with consumer NVME SSDs as cache on top of generic and easily replaceable SATA drives. I still have this IPV6 accessible with IPSEC so I can basically treat it like local storage from all over the world, but I'll probably turn that off now that I'm using wireguard nearly all the time (IPSEC is faster since the tiny EdgeRouter processor isn't having to handle it).

It's pretty neat being basically "in your home office" from almost anywhere with decent internet.

Post reply on HN